Powering Britain's
Battery Revolution

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Research

The Faraday Institution research programme spans ten major research projects that bring together 25 UK universities, spanning a network of 500 researchers and 148 UK and 30 international industry partners to drive discovery in application-inspired research, working to solve some of the most challenging energy storage issues.

The research programme has three strands:

Materials Development to Pack Design and Performance

Projects within this strand harness world-class research to deliver advances in battery chemistries, materials systems, and engineered components by integrating advanced computational and experimental approaches to address challenges in battery performance, safety and reliability.

Sustainable Manufacture, Scale-up and Recycling

These projects target high impact areas to improve battery manufacturing cost, time and energy usage, by improving the fundamental knowledge of key manufacturing processes including electrode manufacture. Research is embedding design-for-recycling principles into industry thinking and providing a UK EV battery recycling industry with a pipeline of scalable technologies.

Next-generation Technology Demonstrators and Transformational Challenges

These projects accelerate the real-world validation of breakthrough battery chemistries by bridging fundamental research and practical demonstration. This strand advances research into, for example, solid-state, lithium-sulfur and sodium-ion batteries, from laboratory concept to practical use. Transformational Challenges target energy storage applications with extraordinary impact potential where only conceptual solutions currently exist.

Materials Development to Pack Design and Performance

The Degradation, Multi-scale Modelling, SafeBatt and 3D-CAT projects form this research strand.

Sustainable Manufacture, Scale-up and Recycling

The Nextrode, FAST and ReLiB projects form this research strand.

Next-generation Technology Demonstrators and Transformational Challenges

The SOLBAT, NEXGENNA and LiSTAR projects and the nascent UltraStore and HighPerCell Transformational Challenges make up this research strand.

View our Scientific Publications

Our Impact

From research discoveries to commercial spin-outs, policy guidance to public engagement, this selection of case studies from the Faraday Institution and its research community demonstrates the impacts we are making on UK science, the economy and future generations of researchers.

Smaller Projects and Fellowships

The Faraday Institution funds a variety of smaller, shorter-term projects and fellowships:

International Programmes

The Faraday Institution continues to strengthen its position as a trusted partner in global battery research and innovation.

Batteries For Emerging Economies

The Faraday Institution is leading the UK Government’s Ayrton Challenge on Energy Storage including a £5m R&D programme to support clean energy delivery in the global south.

Industry Sprints

Short projects focused on specific short-term industry research needs that lie within the broad scope of our research projects.

Industry Fellows

This innovative programme is strengthening ties between industry and academic battery researchers in the UK with the aim of establishing or enhancing collaborative research with the potential for near- and longer-term benefit to the UK battery industry.

Entrepreneurial Fellows

Financial and business support to start-ups in the area of energy storage technologies to drive battery innovation.

Research Community

The Faraday Institution has created a flourishing environment for commercially relevant energy storage research and innovation. It has united a powerhouse of a research community – 500+ strong from across 25 universities – working with 148 UK and 30 international industrial partners. Highly competitive university research groups across the UK now work in active collaboration. Over half of the scientists engaged as co-investigators on our research projects are new to battery science, having transferred their expertise from other areas of materials sciences. Read how…

Researcher Spotlights

Meet the Faraday Five Hundred! The Faraday Institution has over 500 researchers from various universities, disciplines, projects, and career stages. These researcher spotlights highlight their important work, the range of journeys into battery science, and the multi-dimensional diversity in our community.

Alastair Hales

Alastair is an industry fellow and lecturer at the University of Bristol improving model parameterisation for thermal management systems in lithium-ion batteries. He tells us about his struggles with imposter syndrome and collaborating with researchers from different areas of expertise.

Katja Kress

Katja is a PhD researcher at the University of Sheffield developing new battery materials as part of the Faraday Institution’s FutureCat project. She tells us about her work, the importance of facing your fears, and her journey moving from Germany to the UK for a PhD during a pandemic.

Chunhong Lei

Chunhong Lei is a research associate at the University of Leicester developing a novel delamination technique to return high-purity materials to new battery manufacture as part of the Faraday Institution’s ReLiB project. He tells us about leading a highly collaborative team during the pandemic, and the importance of battery recycling.

Our Research Programme by the Numbers

25

Universities

148

Industry partners

500

Researchers

1206

Scientific papers published

56

Inventions identified

Battery Innovation Programme - Research, Innovation and Scale-up

See details of the latest projects funded through the Faraday Battery Challenge (now the Battery Innovation Programme), including collaborative R&D projects funded through Innovate UK and the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre

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